The Cumberland Valley has hot humid summers and winters that appear to be the end of the world. I saw the most spectacular thunderstorms I have ever seen there. It snows, but never accumulates more than six inches or so. And it has ice storms that look like a magical diamond kingdom. Sometimes the ice can get an inch thick. Then the sun comes out and blinds you.
Nobody in Tennessee knows how to drive in snow. Most know to stay indoors for ice, though. I didn’t. Actually, I was stuck away from home when a snow/ice storm struck. I made it back to our office OK, but it was about as far east of Nashville as our house was west of Nashville.
“You best take Old Hickory Road home.” I was advised.
Old Hickory Road was a beltway that circled Nashville about twenty miles from the city center. There was a real highway beltway that took a circle about five miles from city center, which I would have normally taken. Ok…conditions really were bad. I resolved to take the extra hour getting home safe.
I didn’t. About five miles down beautiful, rural, snow-and-ice-covered Old Hickory Road, I saw headlights coming toward me. It was impossible to see the actual road, but it had been centered between the banks the road was cut through. The only light was my headlights and lights from rural farmhouses built two hundred feet from either bank and spaced a quarter mile apart. On occasion, a driveway also had a small light just to mark it.
I pulled as far right as I dared and looked for evidence of a driveway where I could fully pull off. The other car seemed to be having less control than I had. At the last minute, I saw a steep unlit driveway that I could reach in time if I sped up. I did and hit it at 35 MPH unconcerned because it was steep, so it would slow me down.
A tree stump did instead. I hit my head pretty bad in the accident and was bleeding. I stepped out of the car into the freezing cold and tried to figure out what happened. The driveway was ancient — probably not a driveway.
The stump was from an old growth tree that had been cut down some thirty years before. So, this couldn’t have ever been a driveway. It was just a part of the bank cleared of vegetation a bit more than a car width wide. I had swerved and didn’t hit the stump head-on. So, it was just a fender bender (and a broken head, still bleeding), but the fender was pushing into the tire so I couldn’t drive away.
I got back in the car and pondered my mortality. I was in a rural area, but not desolate. I could make it to one of the lit farmhouses. I set out and did. I could hear the people talking inside as I knocked and rang the doorbell. It stopped immediately. I saw the outside light go on and inside lights blackened.
“Who is it?” I heard.
“I’ve been in an accident, I’m hurt.”
“He talks like a damn yankee.” I heard one say to the other behind the closed door.
“Go back to your car. We’ll call the state troopers.”
“Ok. Thank you.”
“Dem Yankee.” I heard again as I left.
I found my car, got in, and passed out.
Sometime later, I woke to police lights behind my car.
“Yer not the first yankee to get bit by Sparky’s stump.” the trooper drawled.
I didn’t have any interest in hearing about what he meant by that.
“Yer gonna need a tow.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The only tow truck that’ll come out here in this is Hank.”
“Ok.”
“Y’all don’t understand. Hank’s a hundred an’ five — no, a hundred six now — and I think his tow truck is older than he is.”
“What do ya reckon’ I outta do?” I asked innocently.
He removed his trooper hat, scratched his head, put his hat back on, and stood up straight having come to a conclusion.
“I better call Hank. It’ll take him forever ta git here.”
I waited in the car. A few minutes later, he knocked on the window.
“Hank’s on ‘is way. His rig only goes five miles an hour so it’ll be a while. I gotta go on another call up on Bessy’s ridge. Someone dun run over her dairy cow. Can’t imagine how that happened. Bessy keeps her dairy cow in da barn — specially in weather like this.”
“Tell Bessy I said ‘hi’.”
“Oh. You know Bessy, do yah?”
“No.”
“Oh… well, good luck then. I gotta go.”
The sun was shining when Hank arrived driving two miles per hour in a 1937 flat bed truck (wheels) converted to a tow truck — probably in the ‘50s. He slowly walked around the car trying to decide how to tackle the job. Then he looked at my now clotted head wound.
“Sparky’s bin dead fer pert near thirty years now ‘n ‘es still causin’ trouble. Stupid nigger.”
He started to pull chains toward the car.
“Y’all better git in ma truck ‘n’ warm up.”
I hadn’t said a word. I was mesmerized by this 106-year-old skinny, but solid man wearing overalls from the forties, a conductor cap with ear flaps from the sixties and wrinkled skin from the 1880’s walking slowly but surely as if he belonged to this century.
“Dem yankee,” I heard him mutter as I closed the door to his cab.
By the time he finished pulling me out to the street and bending out my fender with a pry bar, the street was wet — snow and ice relegated to the shady areas under the trees. I wondered if I could just drive it home.
“Can’t drive it yet. That fender will still hit the tire when you turn. I kin tow it back to my barn ta work on it though.”
“OK.”
“OK? Indiana. That’s where yanks started sayin’ OK. Same place as soda.”
He was real. And he drove two miles per hour back to his farm telling me about the six wives he had outlived. He gave up looking for a good woman that would keep when he was 91 — fifteen years he had been on his own.
The farm hadn’t been planted in thirty years though. Rusted tractors from the fifties and horse-drawn rusted plows littered the field. The house had a collapsed roof and it appeared he had moved into a trailer next door. He towed my car to the barn and then seemed confused about how to get inside.
The barn was full of mangy cats in various sizes and shapes of cages. They snarled as he hit the cages with a board and yelled at them to shut up. He moved some boxes off an old metal school teacher’s desk.
“Where the hell did the god damn phone go?” he yelled at a nearby caged cat.
He found the cord on the ground and followed it to the desk drawer. He opened …the drawer and pulled out a black dial phone of a style earlier than I had ever seen in person. I’m guessing it was early fifties. He picked up the receiver and clicked the buttons that the receiver had rested on a few times. I could see that the phone was Bakelite, not plastic. But, it had a dial, so it wasn’t that ancient. Its curves actually made it look more modern than the relatively boxy dial phones of my youth.
“Ira, you there? Ira!” he yelled in the receiver.
He handed it to me. “Ira’s been dead for years. You’ll have to use the dial to call your wife.”
“Girlfriend actually.”
“Shacked up with her are you? I guess that’s the way it works now. Go ahead, use that dial.”
It worked. I could hear the age of the phone in the strange tonal quality, but the dang thing worked. Pat was on her way to pick me up. I walked out into the bright sunshine to see Hank working on my car.
Years later, I told this story to Rush Limbaugh while we were having lunch at Lemongrass Cafe in Sacramento. He wasn’t yet as obese as he got later, but I remember his belly shaking with his loud laughter.
“Hank belongs in Rio Linda,” he said.
“Yep. The cats were livestock. He offered to make me some cat tacos.”
“I guess he heard that old people are supposed to eat cat food.” Rush guffawed again.
Years after that lunch, I would hear Rush’s new nationally syndicated show on his own “Excellence in Broadcasting” radio network. He had made it big. His show had call-ins now (probably an idea from Bob Gehl — the producer of our local Libertarian TV show). I listened in amazement as a call-in claimed to live in the mountains of New Mexico and ate only cat tacos for food. Rush pretended the character was a real call-in.
The character idea was based on Hank though. But, I did have a bad concussion and I am quite crazy. Maybe Hank doesn’t even exist. David can confirm our acquaintanceship with Rush Limbaugh though, and that I did have lunch with him twice and rode in a Maserati to San Francisco with him one other time. And that I followed Heather Hall to Nashville. I suppose Heather might even still be around and can confirm my accident on Old Hickory Road and picking me up with her mom at Hank’s barn. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s all just a memory of something that never actually happened.
You can purchase “I am James,” the book containing the above excerpt, on Amazon.